Updates and Newsletters: The main news stories from the major sources, selected, compiled, and occasionally commented on by Michael Novakhov ("Mike Nova") | Public RSS Feeds on the various topics of Global Security | Topics oriented news reviews

Donald Trump's Big Bet on Less Educated WhitesNew York TimesDonald Trump's Big Bet on Less Educated Whites. By FORD FESSENDEN NOV. 7, 2016. A potential victory for Donald J. Trump may hinge on one important (and large) group of Americans: whites who did not attend college. Polls have shown a deep division ...

M.N.: An idea: Appoint Trump an Ambassador to Russia! But watch him there closely. He will inspire the love of the Russians for America since they love him so much, and will be conveniently out of sight. Trumpik, would you consent? Mr. Tefft, the present Ambassador, could be promoted to head the State Department.

U.S. To Launch Cyberattacks If Russia Interferes In The ElectionsUbergizmoIf you've been following all of the developments related to the upcoming presidential elections in the United States, then you might have heard some people say that Russia is trying to hack the United States to try and influence the elections in some way.

WASHINGTON -- In January 2013, just before she left her position as secretary of state in U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration, Hillary Clinton offered some parting advice for her boss about ties with Russia.

“In stark terms, I advised the president that difficult days lay ahead and that our relationship with Moscow would likely get worse before it got better,” Clinton recounted in her memoir Hard Choices, published the following year.

She was right: Russia-U.S. ties got worse fast -- and it’s unclear when they might get better.

Clinton may end up in the White House in January, if the majority of polls hold true.

But even if her Republican rival, Donald Trump, pulls off a victory, this much will also be true after November 8: U.S. relations with Russia have fundamentally changed. Now, as it was during the Cold War, Moscow is again at or near the top of the United States’ foreign policy agenda.

“We’re at a much lower plateau in relations than we have been in a long, long time,” said Thomas Graham, a former top Russia expert on the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration in the 2000s.

Obama’s first-term bid to “reset” relations with Russia got off to a shaky start when the label on the big red button that Clinton pressed to symbolize the initiative was mistranslated as “overload.”

The gesture came seven months after Russia invaded Georgia and occupied a chunk of its territory. Other controversies, including a Russian law criminalizing gay “propaganda” and a U.S. law imposing sanctions on Russians accused of human rights abuses, also strained ties.

But the big rupture came in 2014, when Russia responded to the downfall of a Moscow-friendly president in Ukraine by seizing the Crimean Peninsula and backing separatists whose war against Kyiv continues despite cease-fire deals. And Moscow has thrown deadly firepower behind Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in that country’s civil war, seeking to prevent his ouster, challenge U.S. clout, and improve Russia’s sway in the Middle East.

“There’s a bipartisan consensus that we’ve got a significant problem with Russia, and if anything the position is we have to be even harder than we were in the past,” Graham said, adding that he does not “see anyone in a new administration coming in and saying ‘well, we need to do a reset, we need to put relations with Russia on a constructive track.”

Trump, the New York real-estate developer, has repeatedly displayed admiration for Vladimir Putin. In September, he said the Russian president has “great control over his country” and has been a leader far more than our president has been.”

He has also lamented what he calls a lack of cooperation between Washington and Moscow on common threats, such as Islamic State (IS) militants and terrorism.

"I would have a very, very good relationship with Putin, and I think I would have a very, very good relationship with Russia,” he said during a televised forum in September.

Those remarks have been welcomed in Moscow. Putin praised Trump at a business forum this year, calling him a “colorful, talented person, without any doubt,” and pro-Kremlin Russian media have talked up Trump while denigrating Clinton.

Trump’s ties to Russia, meanwhile, have come under close scrutiny. His former campaign chairman Paul Manafort used to represent Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian-allied ex-president of Ukraine. Another adviser, Carter Page, reportedly met with top Kremlin officials including those under U.S. sanctions. Page said last month he had left the campaign.

The red button that Hillary Clinton (right) used to symbolically declare a "reset" of U.S. relations with Moscow to her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov (left) in Geneva n 2009.

For her part, Clinton has made clear that she plans a more assertive approach to Russia. Many of her advisers on Russia and European affairs have spoken publicly about the need to push back against Moscow’s actions in Europe, Ukraine, Syria, and elsewhere.

Among those heading her Russian advisory team are Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia; Phil Gordon, a former White House and State Department official; and Julie Smith, a former Pentagon official and deputy national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden.

Also advising Clinton is James Stavridis, a retired U.S. admiral who was NATO’s commander between 2009 and 2013 and was short-listed to be Clinton’s running mate. He has regularly called for a tougher response to Russia, in Ukraine and, more recently, on the alleged hacking of U.S. election-related institutions.

Bipartisan Consensus

Even before the allegations of hacking and meddling in the U.S. elections, Clinton made clear that U.S. policy toward Russia would be much more assertive if she were elected.

"We can't dance around it anymore. We all wish it would go away," she said in a speech in 2015. "We all wish Putin would choose to modernize his country and move toward the West instead of sinking himself into historical roots of tsar-like behavior, and intimidation along national borders and projecting Russian power in places like Syria and elsewhere,” she said.

Add to this the fact that there is growing bipartisan consensus in Congress that a harder approach to Russia is merited.

From Moscow’s perspective, there’s little to indicate that Putin’s aggressive moves -- in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, in Syria, and in the Baltic and Black seas -- will stop anytime soon.

“They’re going to continue to run military exercises. They’re going to continue to demonstrate their capabilities,” Graham said. “I don’t think they want the conflict in [the] Donbas to get out of hand, but they also don’t want to lose the ability to use the conflict as a bargaining chip.”

As secretary of state, Clinton was responsible for implementing the Russia “reset” Obama initiated in 2009, when Dmitry Medvedev was keeping Putin’s seat warm as president.

But Putin’s relationship with Clinton became strained even before he returned to the Kremlin in 2012 for his current six-year term. He accused her of inciting the antigovernment protests that broke out in Moscow after 2011 parliamentary elections that were marred by evidence of widespread fraud in favor of his ruling party.

‘Cyclical Pattern’

With opinion polls pointing to a Clinton victory, some Russian officials have been expressing hopes that the tough U.S. talk is a fixture of the election campaign and that criticism of Moscow would abate after the vote, giving way to a more pragmatic approach.

“We just have to wait until the end of the election campaign,” Sergei Ivanov, a close Putin ally who until August was his chief of staff, told the London-based Financial Times newspaper in an interview published on October 24. “We have to wait a couple more weeks; we just have to be patient.”

The U.S. election “really cannot come too soon,” Fyodor Lukyanov, a Russian foreign policy analyst with close government ties and editor of the journal Russia In Global Affairs, wrote in a commentaryon October 7. “Whoever wins, there will at least be some breathing space.”

But ahead of the vote, Russia put boulders in Clinton’s path toward engagement. The Kremlin pulled out of two symbolic but significant nuclear agreements in October. And Moscow continues to flout American efforts in Syria by backing the Syrian military’s assault on rebel-held eastern Aleppo.

The fiery spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, has accused the Obama administration of conducting a “scorched earth” policy toward Russia -- though U.S. officials believe that sounds more like what Moscow has been doing in the weeks before the election.

Lukyanov said the downturn in relations was part of a cyclical pattern between the two countries and pinned a substantial portion of blame for the tension on Obama, who he said had not built a personal relationship with Putin.

“The cyclical, step-by-step deterioration of the situation has now brought things to a really dangerous brink,” Lukyanov wrote. “The question now is how the transition will go -- and to what.”

Worldview: Trump must not be elected presidentPhilly.comMany Trump supporters believe he would have "brilliant" advisers who would compensate for his lack of experience. But seasoned Republican security experts have shunned Trump because - as 50 former GOP national security officials wrote in a public ...

Trump would be huge threat to our securityThe Seattle TimesBut seasoned Republican security experts have shunned Trump because — as 50 former GOP national security officials wrote in a public statement — he “lacks the character, values and experience to be president.” Trump's only experienced security ...

Trump and Russia: All the Moguls MenDaily BeastOver the next several weeks, major outlets began to question seriously the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, if not indeed the Kremlin, and some of the most obvious links were right in the resumés of many senior members of his campaign team, some of ...and more »

How much damage has FBI done to the Clinton campaign?CNNSam Wang: There is no denying that Clinton took a hit of several percentage points after the Comey announcement. That's despite the fact that it was entirely possible that there were nothing more than copies of already-known emails sitting on a laptop ...and more »

Donald Trump's Instagram Following Is Full Of Bots And RussiansForbesBut Trump is big with bots elsewhere too. Over on Facebook-owned Instagram, Trump's been acquiring a good deal of followers, but significant tranches of them are bots and Russians, researchers from Italy told FORBES today. And, of course, there are ...

US preparing for possible cyber-attacks on Election DayWISH-TVINDIANAPOLIS (WISH) – A recruiting and hiring firm is expanding in Indianapolis. In other business headlines, the U.S. is readying cyber-attacks if Russia tries to hack the election. Jane King was live at the NASDAQ with those stories and more.

Clinton vs. Trump: Who Has Russia's Support?ValueWalkAccording to WIN/Gallup International's recent polling, a whopping 33% of Russians think Trumpwould save America's relations with Russia. And only 4% of Russians would be happy about Clinton's triumph. Some say Clinton's presidency is the worst option ...and more »

Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump nationally by 4 percentage points, according to a pair of polls released on the last day before the presidential election.

ABC News/Washington Post and CBS News surveys out Monday morning show Clinton heading into Election Day with a moderate lead over Trump in a four-person race among likely voters that includes Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

In the ABC/News Washington tracking poll, Clinton garners 47 percent support, followed by Trump at 43 percent, Johnson at 4 percent and Stein at 2 percent.

Clinton's lead is by the same margin in the CBS News poll, in which she tops Trump, 45 percent to 41 percent. Johnson registers at 5 percent, and Stein sits at 2 percent.

The ABC News/Washington Post poll of 1,937 likely voters was conducted Nov. 2-5 via landlines and cellphones. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. The CBS News survey of 1,426 likely voters was conducted Nov. 2-6 via landlines and cellphones. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Donald Trump blasted the FBI's director on Sunday night, telling a crowd of 8,000 people in Michigan that he rejects the bureau's latest move to exonerate Hillary Clinton.

FBI chief James Comey told leaders in Congress hours earlier that a review of 650,000 emails discovered on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner had reinforced his July 5 decision to let her off the hook.

'The investigations into her crimes will go on for a long, long time,' Trump said in the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights.

'The rank-and-file special agents in the FBI won't let her get away with her terrible crimes – including the deletion of 33,000 emails after receiving a congressional subpoena.'

The Republican presidential candidate insisted that it would have been impossible for the FBI to review what has been reported to be as many as 650,000 emails in so short a time

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Trump (above) said: 'The rank-and-file special agents in the FBI won't let her get away with her terrible crimes – including the deletion of 33,000 emails after receiving a congressional subpoena. Right now she's being protected by a rigged system!'

Clinton protected by 'rigged system': Trump at a Michigan rally

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Comey’s decision means the Democratic presidential nominee will not be charged with a crime related to her mishandling of thousands of classified documents on a homebrew email server she used while she was secretary of state.

Congressman Jason Chaffetz fist tweeted out the bombshell news Sunday afternoon before FBI Director James Comey released a letter that said the investigation was closed.

'FBI Dir just informed us 'Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Sec Clinton',' Chaffetz wrote.

Speaking to reporters with Clinton in Cleveland, Ohio, campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri said: 'We have seen Director Comey's latest letter to the [Capitol] Hill. We are glad to see that he has found, as we were confident that he would, that he has confirmed the conclusion that he reached in July, and we're glad that this matter is resolved.'

The investigation was reopened on October 28 – sparked by a <a href="http://DailyMail.com" rel="nofollow">DailyMail.com</a> story that revealed Weiner was sending sexually explicit messages to a 15-year-old girl. The emails in question were found on Weiner's laptop.

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Hillary Clinton (pictured on Sunday morning) was all smiles after being again cleared by the FBI after the investigation into her emails was reopened